Enhancing Geography Education Through Partnerships

The Geography Teacher Educators’ Conference is an annual event for geography tutors from Institutes of Higher Education in the UK to gather and exchange ideas as well as discuss research and current issues on geography education. Dr Tricia Seow and Mr Julian Chang from the Humanities and Social Studies Education Academic Group represented NIE at this year’s conference held in Birmingham UK from 26 to 28 January 2018.

Dr Seow and Mr Chang presented on the topic of “Enhancing Geographical Thinking Through Signature Pedagogies – Challenges And Strategies In The Context Of NIE’s HSSE Sustainability Learning Lab (SSL)” during the conference. The presentation explored the relevance of the geographical inquiry process as signature pedagogy, and the use of contextually rich field sites and multimodal data to inspire deeper learning among geography students. It also drew on two research studies (OER19/15TS and NRF2015-EDU001-IHL12) to demonstrate how the skills, knowledge and dispositions behind the geography discipline could be fostered in students.

While in Birmingham, Dr Seow and Mr Chang made a detour to King Edward’s Consortium, a leading teacher-training institution in England. The aim was to learn from their high-quality school-based programmes for initial teacher training.

The duo also visited Birmingham’s Camp Hill School For Girls to meet with resident trainers from the geography department, as well as find out more about their curriculum and how school-based models of teacher preparation were carried out. Opportunities for collaborations between Camp Hill and NIE’s SSL were also discussed. NIE has indicated its interest to contribute contents from SSL’s fieldwork, sampling videos and data portal to the collaboration, while Camp Hill is keen to share its curriculum resources as part of the instructional material for NIE student teachers.